Saidrahmon Abdurazzoqov
For a few hours on a November afternoon in 2021, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram, and YouTube simply stopped working or were severely restricted across Uzbekistan. The country’s communications regulator, Uzkomnazorat, had blocked them for failing to store user data on local servers, as a new law required. By evening, all five platforms were back online. The president had fired the head of the regulator that same day. It was, in miniature, a preview of how digital policy in Uzbekistan actually functions: fast, top-down, occasionally reversed within hours, and driven as much by individual decisions at the top as by the letter of any law.
That single afternoon captures something the country’s digital statistics never quite manage to on their own. Uzbekistan is, depending on which measure you look at, either a rapid digital reformer or one of the more restricted online environments left in the world. The government’s e-services portal, built soon after Shavkat Mirziyoyev became president in 2016, let citizens file complaints and request paperwork online for the first time, and it worked well enough to spread across every ministry within a few years.
Freedom House, meanwhile, gave the country’s internet a score of 29 out of 100 in its most recent assessment, placing it among a small cluster of states rated “Not Free“ in 2026, alongside Iran, Belarus, and a handful of others. Both descriptions are accurate. Neither one is complete on its own.
The legal groundwork behind that November blocking episode has kept expanding since. The 2019 Law on Personal Data, tightened further in April 2021, requires companies to keep Uzbek users’ data on servers physically located inside the country, the same rule that triggered the platform shutdown that year. TikTok, blocked for the same reason in July 2021, remained subject to repeated restrictions and uncertainty over its accessibility in Uzbekistan. Twitter, VKontakte, Skype, and WeChat were also cut off before being quietly restored in August 2022 except TikTok.
For most of this period, nearly all of the country’s international bandwidth ran through Uztelecom, the state telecom operator, which functioned as the only gateway private providers were legally allowed to use. That arrangement finally changed in June 2024, when Mirziyoyev signed an order letting internet and mobile providers connect directly to international networks, a rule that took effect the following January and effectively ended Uztelecom’s monopoly over the country’s connection to the outside internet.
Alongside that opening, a separate and less publicized system has been growing just as steadily. Uzbek law allows authorities to block online material on grounds of extremism or terrorism, and the number of items removed under that authority has climbed fast, from 800 in January 2024 to 1,389 exactly a year later, according to figures published by the country’s Supreme Court. A December 2024 telecommunications law reorganized the sector once more, expanding the Ministry of Digital Technologies and creating a nominally independent regulator that was finally stood up in August 2025.
Put the two tracks side by side and a pattern comes into focus that is easy to miss if you only look at one or the other. The infrastructure side has been getting freer: more gateways, more competition among providers, an end to the single choke point that made the 2021 blocking possible in the first place. The content side has been getting more expansive: more grounds for removal, more material actually removed, more institutional machinery built specifically to manage it.
Neither trend cancels the other out, and there is nothing unusual about a state building both capacities at once. The European Union also regulates cross-border data transfers under the GDPR through strict safeguards and transfer mechanisms. What sets any individual country’s version apart is not whether these tools exist, since by now most digitizing economies have some version of both, but how often they get used and against what.
Uzbekistan’s Digital Uzbekistan 2030 strategy is explicit about wanting foreign tech investment and a higher spot in international rankings, and that ambition puts these two tracks on a collision course of sorts. Investors tend to care about predictable infrastructure and open gateways.
Rights monitors tend to care about how much gets blocked and why. Four years after that one chaotic November afternoon, the country’s regulator has survived, the platforms have mostly stayed up, and the real question worth watching isn’t which track wins, but whether the next Uzkomnazorat decision gets reversed by dinnertime or quietly becomes permanent.
Saidrahmon Abdurazzoqov The author is an International Relations scholar at Webster University in Tashkent with a particular interest in Central Asian geopolitics, European foreign policy, and regional integration. His work focuses on international relations, diplomacy, and emerging policy issues affecting Eurasia.
